Living in Harmony: An Eastern Shore Village Redeems Discord

By Don Hurst

SECTION ONE
In the first chapters, stories of the community through the experiences of great-grandparents, grandparents, and parents clamor for attention as they set the stage laden with colorful depictions of history and descriptions of the area.

SECTION TWO
In the next series of chapters, the authors own perspective on Harmonizing village discords through his journey from boyhood to manhood to serving as an Ordained United Methodist Pastor are divulged.

SECTION THREE
In the final chapters, key events are folded into the life of Harmony which contribute to its future through key individuals whose values and goals offer promise that the village will continue to live up to the spirit of its name.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Dec 31, 2013
• ISBN: 9781491838624

Don Hurst

A plantation owner, turned gun duelist and gambler, shot and killed 24 opponents. A murderer slit the throat of a promising fourteen-year-old school girl. A respected, popular guitar songster vanished. And too many fathers had drinking problems in the village called Harmony, where the author was reared. Fortunately, patriotic heroes, the Hurst family, and their many friends, right-up through the present time, wrestle with heartrending discordances to maintain Harmony’s name. But beware, for even though readers may have been born and reared beyond the confines of the village of Harmony on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, this author’s writing may cause readers to wrestle with their own village discordances. Harmony’s unforgettable characters, who helped him grow up to become who he is today, are featured in his memoir.

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© 2014 DON HURST. All rights reserved.

All rights to text, pictures and illustrations are reserved by Donald Hurst.

No part of this manuscript and publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise, except as permitted under sections 107 or 108 of the United states copyright Act, without the prior written permission of the author.

Requests for permission should be addressed to

Don Hurst at [e-mail]

Published by AuthorHouse 01/14/2014

ISBN: 978-1-4918-3863-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4918-3862-4 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013921815

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

CONTENTS

DEDICATION

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

FOREWORD

PREFACE

SECTION ONE

Chapter 1 PUGILIST

Chapter 2 COURAGEOUS

Chapter 3 WATERMELONS

Chapter 4 VANISHED

SECTION TWO

Chapter 5 WAYWARD

Chapter 6 PROPRIETOR

Chapter 7 PLANTATIONS

Chapter 8 SOARING WHITE TAIL

Chapter 9 TRUXTON

Chapter 10 MURDER

Chapter 11 WINDOWS

Chapter 12 QUANDARIES

Chapter 13 DIFFERENCES

SECTION THREE

Chapter 14 BLACK OR WHITE

Chapter 15 PASTOR OR SAILOR

Chapter 16 QUESTIONS

Chapter 17 LEGACY

Chapter 18 ENTREPRENEUR

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

The historic Harmony United Methodist Church on the front of this book was painted by the author’s artist friend, Richard Benson, who lives at Jenner’s Pond, Pennsylvania.

DEDICATION

To the many people in the village of Harmony,

who helped the boy, Donnie, get started,

and, who continue to pray for the man, Don.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to Tom Brokaw for his book, The Time Of our Lives, in which he described a reunion he and his wife held with their wealthy, political, cultured, and prominent friends.¹ He helped me realize that everyone has to be born and reared someplace and sometime.

Thanks to the Gospel writer, John, who wrote that Jesus’s disciple, Nathaniel, commented to another disciple, Andrew, regarding Jesus’s home village by saying, Can anything good come from Nazareth? ² He helped me to become aware that everyone’s village, including mine, is important.

These writers helped me learn that all people, no matter who they are or where they come from, need acknowledgement, appreciation, and recognition for what they contribute to the synergistic benefit of all. The village in which I grew up is literally filled with such astounding people.

Thanks to my brothers, Stephen R. Hurst and David J. Hurst, and Harmony Church’s Historian, Mary Ann Todd, and my boyhood friends who became successful businessmen, David Nagel, J L Todd, and Lawrence Fluharty, Jr., without whose help, I would not have been able to identify and accurately portray Harmony’s truly memorable, and a few, disturbingly, unforgettable, characters.

Thanks to one of my newest friends, Ron Gallimore, a research psychologist, who moved from California with his wife, to be near their youngest daughter, son-in-law and granddaughter. In the process, we connected, and he became my writing coach. Without Ron’s patience and guidance, I would not have been able to write this book.

Thanks to one of my best friends, Glenn Catley, a fellow retired pastor and sailor, for jokingly encouraging me to write, so he would not have to keep listening to my stories.

Special thanks to a good friend, Barbara Connall, for her interest and persistence in correcting the writing, spelling, punctuation, and grammar in this book.

Above all, I thank my ever loving wife, Muff Hurst, for her enduring listening, superb quick wit, pertinent knowledge, and constant encouragement to help me to write this book.

Don Hurst, Jenner’s Pond,

Pennsylvania, October 2013

FOREWORD

Harmony’s magical Fowling Creek is now part of time,

for Donnie, who is left with memories of those early years.

Lingering still are the stories that could be yours or mine.

Now as Donnie remembers and reflects, his eyes fill with tears.

He knew that God had chosen him to minister and teach,

but sometimes Donnie felt lost and wondered if he could.

Knowing that God bestowed upon him to guide and to preach,

he drew on the stories from his harmony childhood.

Donnie had the thirst, to reach beyond, to dream and to seek.

He was a young man gazing toward Heaven’s Infinity.

GOD found him near Harmony, by his beloved Fowling Creek,

and took him in his arms, for he had a soul of Destiny.

Written by lifelong friend and author, ©Kathleen Welborn 2013

PREFACE

The history of every family plays out in a context. For the Hurst family that context was Caroline County on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake; the place that eventually became their home and the place of the author’s birth.

Before the settlers, Caroline County was the home of Native Americans. Evidence of their culture is found everywhere. Grindstones, arrowheads, fishhooks, and their old footpaths and bypasses that eventually became lanes and roads that the Hurst family and the author travelled.

Next came English settlers who built a dam for a pond and mill, houses for a miller, some workers, and a post office. Because of its natural beauty, wildlife, and fresh flowing water, they called it Fowling Creek.

Nearby, Richardson and Dickinson, like other wealthy English gentlemen, were granted land patents by Lord Baltimore to create plantations on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Slavery provided them with an over-production of tobacco, driving down the price until the great plantations in Caroline County were broken up and sold off into smaller farms.

After the Revolutionary War, the English soldiers retreated to their homeland and the Church of England priests with them, leaving the area to the Methodist Circuit Riders, who had their first conference in 1784 at Lovely Lane Chapel in Baltimore.

Armed with John Wesley’s Articles of Incorporation for the organization of the Methodist Episcopal Church in America, and led by Francis Asbury, the Circuit Riders were inspired. They grew a Garden of Methodism on Maryland’s Eastern Shore and the State of Delaware.

Joining Fowling Creek road, and other roads that led to Preston, Denton, the village of Bethlehem, and Gainey’s Wharf on the Choptank River, was a hub. Originally, only a country store, a little red schoolhouse and a rustic church stood here.

Recognizing this hub as an ideal site to serve the area’s farm families, a doctor, a store keeper, blacksmiths, teachers, employees, and some retired farmers in the mid-19th Century built a dozen, custom two-story, beautiful, ornate Victorian homes for their families. The original small rustic church was moved to the edge of the village and given to the few Negro families who previously had been seated in its balcony. It was replaced by the White residents with a stately new white structure with large clear glass windows and green shutters.

The little red schoolhouse was also moved for the Negro children and a new clapboard school house was built for the white children. Also an up-to-date store was built to replace the old one. An emerging community had become a village with no name, a circumstance that was soon to change.

A neighboring village, four miles away, patriotically named American Corners, and other nearby villages, named after their churches of Concord, Friendship, Chestnut Grove, and Bethlehem, helped provide residents of the unnamed hub, who were attending a Camp Meeting conducted by the Circuit Riders, assigned by Methodism’s Bishop Francis Asbury, an appealing name for their church and community.

Mindful of the caring nature of the residents and the influence of those in attendance at the Camp Meeting, the suitable name Harmony was chosen for a church and village proud of the way neighbors pitched in to help rebuild homes destroyed by fire or storm; a small village where the sick were provided care and meals. Building upon this tradition of dealing with tragic and hair-raising tragedies which came to the residents of Harmony, they continued to make bridges out of the discords of obstacles and barriers that occurred to them through the years.

Like any community, Harmony has had its share of discord, some ordinary and mundane, some worse, arising from the actions of a gun duelist, a murderer, alcoholics, and other challenges the community has had to face to become what she is today.

But Harmony

Never gives up, never gives in,

Doesn’t whine, complain or make excuses,

Optimism is her true moral courage,

It’s where everyone is a teacher to someone.³

And Harmony continues to stride forward redeeming discord.

Harmony’s remarkable patriotic heroes, as well as, families and friends going back generations, including the author’s own family, right up to the present time, find ways of aiding the village’s struggle to live up to its name.

Here’s hoping you have an enjoyable read and invite others to read Living In Harmony, too!

Don Hurst, Jenner’s Pond,

Pennsylvania, 2013

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SECTION

ONE

Chapter 1

PUGILIST

The great English sailing ship, Solomon Jackson, plied the Atlantic from the British Isles to the colonies delivering much needed fabric for settlers to make their clothing and then returned laden with furs and tobacco for cold, nicotine-addicted Englishmen. She traded at many ports on the rivers of Maryland’s Eastern Shore but catered mainly to the ports of Oxford, Cambridge, Chestertown, Salisbury, Easton, and Denton.

Wishing a name for their first born son that represented power, prestige, wisdom, wealth, stability, and a sense of adventure, John and Rebecca Hurst chose this ship’s name, Solomon Jackson, to place in front of their son’s last name, connecting him to an ancestral isle in England on which stood a castle bearing their family name. They were English to the core.

Solomon Jackson Hurst, a big name for a little lad, who was born in a cabin with a creek named after it, Cabin Creek, about nine miles up the Choptank River from Cambridge. It was a long way from their homeland of England for the little boy. What would he do? Who would he become in America?

Sol, as they called him, when only nine years of age, rowed with his father a mile down Cabin Creek and another three more miles down the Choptank River to get salt, pepper, sugar, and coffee for his mother at the store in Secretary. It was a long row but shorter than walking over the inland trails and sparsely paved oyster-shelled trails. When he became a teenager, he rowed by himself to the store for his mother.

While rowing, he learned to watch and listen for the Mallard Ducks, Blue Herons, Canada Geese, Crows, Herons, and Bald Eagles above and the many beautiful song birds in the trees, and shrubbery along the shore. In season, he watched the watermen fish their nets for Rock, Herring, Shad and Bluefish which swam up the river to spawn in the spring time and dip up bushels of crabs from their baited lines, to be sold at the wharf in Secretary.

Sol watched and favored the more physically challenging tonging of oysters with rakes attached to twenty-foot wooden shafts which enabled them to reach oyster bars on the muddy bottom. When they pulled the rakes together and up into the oystermen’s boats, they delivered profitable catches of oysters. Physically strong and well-balanced men accomplished this demanding task from small boats in the coldest winter weather when ice would collect on their toughened hands as they let the tongs slide back down into the water. Sol grew to be a strong young man, over six feet tall. After his father agreed to allow him to work on the water with with Secretary’s oystermen, he also gained incredible balance by working the tongs in rough waves while standing in small boats.

When there was too much ice in the winter time on the river to oyster, he walked five miles to attend the one-room school at East New Market. In the summer, he learned gardening from his mother and farming by helping his father. He was beginning to fulfill the dream his parents had in naming him. Still they felt he needed to learn to reach beyond the confines of Cabin Creek, so when he became of age, they encouraged him to venture out and work on a large farm in Delaware.

He returned home at Christmas time with sixty-dollars. Since his father, had no money, he asked him for money to buy Christmas presents for his younger siblings. Sol gave half of what he had earned to his father, kept the rest, and promptly moved to Secretary. He loved his parents and his younger brother and sister, but it was time for him to move on.

Following the admonition of John Wesley, whom he learned about in Secretary’s Methodist Church, he began to use his own money accordingly. He earned all he could by beginning his own business as a young livery stable owner. He gave all he could to his father for his siblings Christmas presents, spend all he could, which at this stage in economic development was almost nothing, and saved the rest. Handling money, keeping books, and dealing with customers to their satisfaction in his new venture granted him a marvelous opportunity for understanding an practicing in his own business.

In addition to tending his Livery Stable business, he began to pay attention to Secretary’s wharf, where not all the watermen were admirable characters. Some captains were said to pay their workers off with the boom on their Skipjack sailboats, a devious method of compensation accomplished by bringing their sailboats about quickly in the wind without telling workers and knocking them overboard to be drowned. Sol learned, by being around the wharf, not only to physically defend himself but also to control, in an orderly manner, watermen docking and using the wharf for their own sole purposes alone. Theirs was mainly a matter of cunning and strength conducted arbitrarily without regard for others. Recognizing, understanding, appreciating, and, to whatever extent was necessary, abiding by his authority as the strongest man on the wharf, watermen began to respect and appreciate Sol for his fighting and leadership abilities. He fought his way, as a pugilist, to the top to be Secretary’s paid Wharf Master. It was well known, under his leadership, that watermen were treated fairly on the Secretary’s wharf.

While still a Livery Stable owner and Wharf Master Sol met and married, Caroline Murphy, of Irish descent. Sol loved Carrie dearly and completely but never brought himself to fully accept her not being fully English. He possessed a strong and unjustifiable sense of English pride. She brought humor, fun, and probably even drinking into their family, all of which in time he grew to appreciate and practice himself.

Adventurously, Sol and Carrie bought and lived in a small Secretary starter house.

After their home was paid for, he and Carrie bought and prepared to move to their next home located on a farm. He and Carrie hired a skipjack sailboat to move them and their new baby daughter, Reba, up the Choptank River to their new Farm in Caroline Country. Many years later when asked by his grandson the reason he bought the Farm in Caroline County, he said the land was cheap.

Sol, Carrie, and their friends spent a day loading household furniture, kitchen wares, clothes, prized personal possessions, gardening and farming tools, as well as gifts from their family and friends onto the skipjack. The horses and cows would be purchased from neighbors after they arrived. The skipjack was loaded to the gunnels.

Little freeboard was a concern as they prepared to leave early the next morning on a flood tide to help push them up the river. Due to abaft beam steady prevailing South West winds, they would not have to tack which would help to move them safely toward their new home. Secretary neighbors and friends, who had helped them load the day before, came and wished them well and saw them off with hugs and tears. Carrie wept as she left her Murphy family behind and ventured forth for a new and different life with Sol and their baby daughter, Reba.

They made good time sailing up the Choptank on a beautiful day. Little did they expect what would happen as they neared Todd’s Wharf and prepared to tie up. The tide eventually petered out, grew slack, turned, and began to flow against them. To add insult to injury, the wind, as it often does when the tide changes, began to blow against them. An anchor was cast over to hold the ship in place. To walk the skipjack forward about two hundred feet to the wharf, they transported another anchor in a small row boat forward of the one already down and winched her ahead. This was a simple process called kedging, but the inexplicable happened.

When the kedging anchor was dropped, the line running back to the skipjack turned the dingy over and pulled it down. It was impossible for the captain wearing hip boots to swim, and there was no way Sol could save him because the hip boots would pull him down and under.

The captain went under the water and in a little while came up crying, Tell my wife, and then went under again, bubble, bubble, bubble. The captain came up a second time and cried out again, Tell my wife, and went under again, bubble, bubble, bubble. Sol thought three strikes and the captain would be out. He came up a third time and cried out, Tell my wife, and started down and under for the last time, bubble, bubble, bubble, but, in that instant, the dingy turned bottom side up, came up under him and saved him. The captain held on, removed his hip boots, and swam to shore.

Once on shore he pulled his money, rolled Eastern Shore style, from his pocket, rung it out and said, Money is not worth a dam to a drowning man.

Sol gained wonderful audiences with Carrie’s help through the years, as he told this story of their move to their new friends in Caroline County. After he finished telling the story, if no one else asked, she would inquiringly ask, Did you ever find out what he wanted to tell his wife? After Sol said no one ever found out, Carrie always asked their friends what they thought the captain wanted to tell his wife. Sol’s interesting stories seasoned with Carrie’s quick-witted humor always enlivened friendly gatherings.

Their Todd Farm’s utilitarian, wooden structure home, with an undivided living and kitchen, a first floor bedroom, and two loft bedrooms, provided for their basic housing needs. It was not the classic two-and-half storied mansion one mile up the road from the wharf which, unknown to them at the time, was where they would eventually move. Theirs was a small, unpretentious working farm without the long drive lined with beautiful trees leading up to the front door of the mansion.

From neighbors on similar farms, they bought two horses and a cow. Fortunately, the former owners of their farm had constructed sheds which they used to protect their horses and a cow in cold winter weather.

It was not long before Sol discovered that charcoal was being bought by a company in Baltimore. He began cutting seasoned timber suitable for making charcoal, burned and covered it with dirt, and, at just the right time, removed the dirt to make charcoal which